When was the last time you had a "burning bush" experience? I mean an experience that etched itself into your soul so that it became an integral part of you? When you could say you had stood "on holy ground"? When you knew you had experienced a "time of inherent excellence"?
It is commonly believed - at least in the outside world - if not also in the Unitarian Universalist world - that Unitarian Universalists have an emotional range from A to B - that we are so rational we would not submit ourselves to experiences that might scratch the veneer of reason alleged to dominate our religious sensibilities - that confronted with a burning bush along the way, we would try to put out the fire. I beg to differ. There are many burning bushes along the Unitarian Universalist way.
We have no doubt hear of mountain top or "peak experiences" when we celebrate a sense of being part of something greater than we are - the cosmos, beauty, a cause. Our history is replete with such moments whether you use a burning bush or mountain top metaphor.
One of our forbears, Henry David Thoreau, relates this childhood experience. When she found him still awake one evening, his mother asked, "Why, Henry dear, why don't you go to sleep?" "Mother," said he, "I have been looking through the stars to see if I couldn't see God behind them."[1]
That openness to the "peak experience" pursued him into adulthood, as we note from his Journal as he reached the summit of Saddleback Mountain: "There was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts or Vermont or New York could be seen while I still inhaled the clear atmosphere of a July morning, if it were July there. All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.... It was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision.... But when its own sun began to rise on this pure world, I found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of Aurora.... and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god."[2]
There is something about the sheer beauty of nature that calls to the deepest within us. It gives us perspective, reminding us we are part and parcel of a world whose incredible balances make life possible - if not necessary. Experiences of the natural world can heal our troubled souls like nothing else; at the same time they humble us with the grandeur of being; they exalt us as we realize we are a piece of this amazing puzzle.
However, I would presume to add two more topographical features to the idea of a mountain top or peak experience. We might also think of plateau and valley experiences. Plateau experiences are not marked by the intensity or the ecstasy of the peak experience. Rather they are characterized by a kind of serendipity, an oceanic feeling a la Sigmund Freud, a sense of total well-being. The plateau is doubtless the experience that for many of us is the most common and the most sustaining.
We do not have to go far back in our religious history to illustrate the plateau experience. The late poet May Sarton wrote these words as she was recovering from a stroke: "A moment of pure joy, as I lay in the chaise lounge for a few minutes - it was four. The afternoon light struck two sprigs of mountain laurel, so richly white, in a brilliant blue glass vase - the whole room was filled with their presence and I just lay there and looked."[3]
There is nothing especially dramatic in this experience. It was just an ordinary afternoon, with an ordinary sun and an ordinary mountain laurel. What makes that experience religious is the extraordinary capacity to pay attention to the world - to life - to pay attention and appreciate - to appreciate and to find joy in the ordinary. That is the poet's sensibility, something each of us would do well to cultivate.
Or, take another plateau experience - this time from Theodore Parker, 19th century Unitarian preacher and reformer, as he reports a childhood incident. Walking home one day he saw a lovely pond with rare flowers in bloom nearby. He stopped to enjoy it and saw basking in the sun a spotted tortoise: "I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked example. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, 'It is wrong!' I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion.
"I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, 'Some ... call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul.' 'If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice....' I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me."[4]
Again we find the plateau experience is nothing particularly dramatic - hardly ecstatic - just the everyday experience of a young boy and a perceptive mother. Yet the plateau is powerful.
Then there is the valley experience - the inevitable moments of suffering, meaninglessness and despair which probe our very depths as human beings. Far removed from the ecstasy of the mountain top, or even from the heights of the plateau, these experiences take us down to the painful deeps of the spirit. They are nonetheless religious. They grasp us totally and will not let us go.
Out of our history comes a narrative from Margaret Fuller, one of the outstanding figures of the 19th century - scholar and author - editor of the transcendentalist journal, The Dial, pioneer in the women's movement. Her life was full of rage at the subservient status of women. Beyond that, her own life was marked by tragedy; she died in a shipwreck at age 40. Perhaps you can hear the despair in her voice as she writes on Thanksgiving Day 1831, in the wake of the death of her friend Horace Greeley's little boy. She wrote Greeley from Italy: "The conditions of this planet are not propitious to the lovely, the just, the pure; it is these that go away; it is the unjust that triumph."
Later, on an ill-fated voyage returning from Italy, she witnessed the burial of the captain at sea: "It is vain by prudence to seek to evade the stern assaults of Destiny. I submit."[5]
She perished with her family on that same voyage as the ship hit a sandbar, within 50 yards of the American shore. She had earlier left a packet of letters with friends to be read at her death: ".... Say to those I leave behind that I was willing to die. I have suffered in life far more than I enjoyed, and I think quite out of proportion with the use of my living here to others. I have wished to be natural and true, but the world was not in harmony with me - nothing came right for me.... Say to all that should any accident possible to these troubled times transfer me to another scene of existence, they need not regret it. There must be better worlds than this - where innocent blood is not ruthlessly shed, where treason does not so easily triumph, where the greatest and the best are not crucified."[6]
There are moments when we "walk through the valley of the shadow of death," when the world is not right with us - when living seems not worthwhile - when our noblest efforts have been thrown on the scrap heap - when our deepest emotions have been discarded - when death seems the easier path.
Yet, there is something holy about such moments of deep despair. Such experiences can be cleansing and pure. The tears of mourning are spiritually powerful as we tap into the deepest part of our being where there is no sham - no pretense - only the truest parts of ourselves can be found.
Take the example of a ministerial colleague, Jack Mendelssohn, testifying to a valley experience of childhood: "I was eight. I awoke one night in the darkness of my room and looked out into the lighted hall, where I caught a harrowing glimpse of my father helping my mother down the stairs. Her face was twisted with pain. It was the last time I ever saw her.
"Years later I learned that a miscarriage took her to the hospital that night, but such matters were not discussed with children in my family. Grandmother came the next morning, and an air of mystery haunted the house. I knew only-that my mother was ill and that children were not allowed to visit the hospital. "A few nights later I was awakened again and heard my grandmother and father whispering. Soon they left. No one told me, but I knew what was happening. In the darkness of my parents' room I paced, sobbing aloud, 'She can't die. Oh God, don't let her die.'
"She did die, and at dawn my father and grandmother returned to tell me what had happened. The cause, though it meant nothing to me at the time, was peritonitis, an ailment which in later years became readily curable. All that mattered to me then was the loss of the most important person in my world. I was hurt and angry, desolate and resentful. For the first time in my life, I asked God for something. I begged God for something. And God turned and struck me across the face."[7] Out of that valley experience he became one of our outstanding Unitarian Universalist ministers.
Why do such moments stay with us? Why do they transform our lives? Why are they so riveting? I don't know. I only know that each of us - yes, even those of us who pride ourselves on our rational approach to life, have these "times of inherent excellence" which are engraved in our souls, which leave us different people. I'm not really sure we can cultivate them, though surely we can be more open to them. As Wallace Stevens says of these "moments of awakening," they are "not balances that we achieve but balances that happen."[8]
Sometimes we have experiences that are not peak or valley or plateau but a mysterious combination of each and we know we walk on holy ground. In June of 1994 I heard Carl Scovel deliver the Berry Street Essay at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. Carl is a friend and highly respected colleague, a devout Unitarian Universalist Christian, minister of our most traditional church, King's Chapel in Boston. He spoke of what he called "The Great Surmise ... At the heart of creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, and to which we shall at last return.... Our work on earth is to explore, enjoy, and share this goodness. 'Too much of a good thing,' said Mae West, 'is wonderful.' Sound doctrine."[9]
One respondent to this discourse was the late Deane Starr, a good friend of Carl's for 30 years, an agnostic and iconoclast. He disputed Carl's confidence in this "good intent," saying he found conflict and a cosmic indifference to humanity at the heart of creation. He was puzzled at Carl's sense of loneliness, a gap filled for Carl by a loving concern at the heart of creation. Deane the humanist found his sense of ultimate community with nature, not God, though he does not much distinguish them.
Then this rational humanist stunned this highly reasonably crowd by leading a song seldom heard among us, but which had been part of his rather pietistic upbringing, the feeling for which remained. "In the Garden." You know it: "I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses... and he walks with me and he talks to me." It was a strange but powerful moment.
Then he transfixed us again with this confession: "My third son, Paul Michael, died of AIDS on December 31, 1992. I was positive that never again could I experience joy; I would have been content simply to find some release from anguish. I wondered whether I could find that relief by a return to the religion of my youth. Perhaps I could find comfort, once again, in the arms of Jesus. So I attended a little fundamentalist church in Naples, Florida. It didn't work; I left the service as deeply in pain as when I entered it.
"That evening, I took a sunset cruise out into the Gulf of Mexico. The sunset was unbelievable! The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, was aglow with color, reds, and purples, and pinks, and golds. Then the colors faded and that indescribable deep, deep indigo of late twilight filled the sky. The boat turned around to head back to Naples. There on the eastern horizon was a full and glorious golden moon.
"With the tears streaming down my face, I realized that even though my son's being had been scattered, he remained a part of this awesome beauty. We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings, but whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty."[10]
Carl Scovel, ruminating on this experience, could only write "...that gave me a new angle on Unitarian Universalism. It's a community where Christians give the lectures and humanists lead the hymns."[11]
When you are asked about Unitarian Universalists and there is an implication that we're that rational and unfeeling group - that we don't have an emotional range beyond A to B - that we live only in our heads - that we'd be likely to throw water on any burning bush along the way - just remember, it isn't so. It just isn't so.
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